Floodwaters renew pollution warnings

Published 3:38 pm, Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Peoria (Ill.) Public Works employee James Abbott checks a sandbag wall built along the city riverfront that keeps floodwaters from the Illinois River at bay.

Peoria (Ill.) Public Works employee James Abbott checks a sandbag wall built along the city riverfront that keeps floodwaters from the Illinois River at bay.

Photo: Fred Zwicky, Associated Press

Floodwaters renew pollution warnings

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Veronica Tate knew from the stench that sewage was among the 8 feet of water that swamped the basement of her ranch-style home after the nearby Meramec River overflowed. The larger concern for residents of her suburban St. Louis neighborhood is the unknown of what else the noxious blend might have contained.

“It came up through the sewers, I guess,” Tate, a customer service representative for an insurance company, said of last week’s flooding. “When you get down there and look at it, there’s a smell. There’s an odor.”

Elite runners start the first wave of Bay to Breakers 2018San Francisco Chronicle

Coyote trots around Golden Gate parkTed Andersen, SFGATE

Wastewater was a certainty in her Arnold neighborhood, given that two nearby treatment plants failed when the Meramec flooded in record fashion after days of unrelenting rain. The inundation has spewed tens of millions of gallons of untreated human waste, according to the sewer district’s website, on a path toward the Mississippi River and an unavoidable southward trek to the Gulf of Mexico. Those plants remained offline Tuesday.

But the floodwaters also could include such things as fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides washed away from farmland, not to mention livestock waste, industrial chemicals, dead animals, fuel from convenience stores and toxins from railroad tracks. Even pollutants from things as small as the gas can in a flooded garage.

Much of the pollution eases its way into the Meramec and other rivers that feed into the Mississippi, for many communities the source of drinking water.

Floodwaters may contain more than 100 types of disease-causing bacteria, according to a 2012 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists. And while the frequency of waterborne illnesses due to flooding is not immediately clear, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that direct contact with inundations and the fecal bacteria in them could cause gastrointestinal illness or other infections.

The rains that caused this winter’s flood, blamed already for at least 25 deaths in Missouri and Illinois and damage to hundreds of homes and businesses, ended a week ago. But the water continued rising Tuesday in southern Missouri and Illinois. Several other states along the Mississippi still were bracing for the crest.